Introducing Neeva: An Ad-free Search Engine
A former Google VP is starting an ad-free search engine that will compete with his previous company.
Google has faced several competitors throughout its time and none have succeeded in overtaking the search giant. Companies like Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo have each taken their stab yet Google still maintains about 90% of the search market share. (source)
The search engine’s success can be attributed to its ability to deliver quality, relevant results to searchers. It has consistently been at the forefront of innovating an algorithm that can match searchers’ needs.
Former Google vice president of Ads and Commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy, believes the search giant has its vulnerabilities, however. After 15 years with the company, he left in 2018 to start his own search engine called Neeva.
What is Neeva?
Neeva is an ad-free search engine that requires a subscription to use. It can be linked to personal accounts like Microsoft Office, Dropbox, or Google. Outside of just searching the web, users are also able to search their personal documents such as emails, presentations, and more.
The search engine is not being built from the ground up and will rely on Bing search results. It will also pull in data from different sources such as weather.com, Apple Maps, and Intrinio stocks.
The company has raised $37.5 million in funding from venture capital firms Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, as well as Ramaswamy himself. There is a waitlist to subscribe to the search engine and initial users are given free access until the end of the year. Following the first year, users can expect to pay less than $10 per month.
Why did Ramaswamy leave Google to start Neeva?
In an article with the New York Times, Ramaswamy explains the issues he had with the direction of Google Search:
“The relentless pressure to maintain Google’s growth… had come at a heavy cost to the company’s users. Useful search results were pushed down the page to squeeze in more advertisements, and privacy was sacrificed for online tracking tools to keep tabs on what ads people were seeing.”
The New York Times — June 19, 2020
In recent years, paid search ads have taken significantly more traffic from organic (unpaid) search results. According to a study from SparkToro, between 2016 and 2018, the click-through-rate of paid search ads on mobile devices increased by nearly 70%.
There have been several changes to Google search results to favor ads. For example, the color of the Ad identifier has changed from yellow to black, making ads difficult to differentiate from unpaid results. Additionally, ads take up more space and draw the eye using images.
Ramaswamy’s motivation behind Neeva is to create a search engine that doesn’t have to make these compromises.
What are the advantages of an ad-free search engine?
The idea behind being ad-free is that it will enable Neeva to entirely focus on providing quality user experience. Ultimately, the belief is that this will provide a better product in the long-term.
The ad-free subscription model has historically disrupted large, established industries. Subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix or Hulu, for example, started the cord-cutting revolution that is making cable television obsolete. Today, more people pay for streaming services than cable or satellite television. (source)
There are obvious challenges with the paid subscription model, especially when it is up against free ad-based models. Gabriel Weinberg, chief executive of search engine DuckDuckGo, believes this to be the case. He claims “… you have to be free because Google will be free forever.” (source)
DuckDuckGo is an ad-based search engine that protects the privacy of users by not selling data to advertisers. From 2015 to 2019, the search engine saw nearly a 400% increase in total queries. (source) The search engine’s exponential growth can be in part attributed to a growing concern among consumers about data privacy.
Neeva will provide users with similar protections and even has a Digital Bill of Rights that states their principals about privacy. Being ad-free gives Neeva no reason to store or mine user data. User behavior such as account linking or search history will simply be used to personalize their experience.
Closing thoughts
Google is a massive incumbent that will take great measures to compete with. That said, being small and nimble can be an advantage for Neeva.
Google’s $115 billion advertising arm is under immense pressure from shareholders to keep cashing out. As long as this is the case, they will only continue to compromise search results to favor ads. This is especially apparent after they recently promoted former head of advertising, Prabhakar Raghavan, to head of search.
By protecting user data and providing users access to content that is not available on other search engines, Neeva could prove to be a more reliable source of information. This new model could evolve the way we search and navigate the internet. At the very least, the founding of Neeva shows that even the most dominant companies have holes to poke.
